Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Virtual visas: Avatars get right to roam

New technologies too often begin in walled gardens – services are closed, accessible only to certain users. AOL found the downside to this: as the web became more open and more popular, its users climbed the walls to escape AOL's subscriber-only pages and join with everyone else.

At the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, the two firms revealed a plan to allow avatars to travel from one virtual world, say Second Life, to another, for example ActiveWorlds. They suggest developing a set of open standards that allow an avatar to move between worlds easily, keeping its appearance, name and any digital currency – a kind of virtual passport scheme.

If the city of Beijing were to take on the new standard, the avatars of the 10,000 people it hopes will work in a virtual version of the city could simply stroll into Second Life or another virtual world to relax after work.

But could the proposal has the potential to take virtual worlds to a different place altogether. The web has no way to accommodate people as individual, certified and identifiable (if necessary) users. Some say this has hampered development of the web – and allowed some illegal practices to flourish.

Under the IBM/Linden scheme, people could have a single verifiable identity across all virtual worlds. That would make them more like the real world – and a lot less like the web.

"Under the IBM/Linden scheme, people could have a single verifiable identity across all virtual worlds."

How is this inference drawn?

The idea is basically to define a set of standards which allow an avatar from system A to be converted into an avatar of system B.At no point does that imply any verification of identity.

What is identity anyway, most systems verify that you are the user who set up the account, by a username/password combination. That identity doesn't mean anything, it's just a means of maintaining a consistent presence.

Consider NS users as a type of avatar. I log on here to post this comment.If there were additional meta information attached to my user, and an open standard I might have that information automatically transferred to theRegister via an open standard for when I wish to comment on an article there. Apart from saving me typing in another username and password has it achieved anything? Maybe, maybe not.But it does mean that the register has to place it's trust in NS, and also that there has to be protection from me pretending to be a verified user from NS and tricking theReg into letting me comment.

I suppose in conclusion I think that is a pretty small development and the author is making too much of a big deal about it, especially around the comments on identity.

You are right to say that the standards drawn up could fall considerably short of being a kind of identity. But I think I am justified to suggest they might be.

IBM/Linden said an avatar's name, appearance, and digital currency could be made portable. Is there much more to an identity in a virtual world?

Most virtual worlds require you to register a credit card to create an avatar. That will likely be required if virtual currency is to become portable - forming a strong link between you and your wandering avatar.

That's some way beyond a presence defined by a unique email/password combination.

If we're talking about paid for services then it's unlikely that access is going to be offered from System B to a user of system A without some additional payment taking place.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but whilst I wouldn't strongly object to basic avatar details (appearance for example) being transferable, I'd definitely avoid any system where my credit card details were going to be transferred to a third party.

I guess we're really talking about avatars in persistent online worlds such as World of Warcraft and second life.I get the feeling that this is a solution looking for a problem at the moment, a persistent online identify is not something that most users want or are interested in, well not at the price of having credit card or other personal details potentially floating around and escaping.

I like the idea of my personal avatar being common to multiple virtual worlds. I was assuming this would be achieved by having a standard file which I would upload to that world when I created my account there.

I'm not so sure that I would want to connect real money used in one world to that in another. Various game worlds I have been in over the years have had incidents where bugs in the money supply have been exploited resulting in the local virtual currency being reduced to zero value. In a game this is highly frustrating, but the whole point of a game is that it is not reality.

Likewise, impersonation of an avatar will be much easier than impersonation of a real person. An avatar is only a file of data which must be copyable to be any use at all. Even if I were to create a custom body, it would have to appear in someone else's browser and once it is in their browser they have the file and could capture and copy it.

Anything you see over the internet could be false. You might be reading a Wikipedia item just after it has been hacked and before someone restores it.

Anyone you meet in a chatroom or game world could be totally different in terms of age, gender, creed, and/or race in the real world. If you cannot cope with that risk, meet people in the real world instead.